Cover not available
Part of
Describing Cognitive Processes in Translation: Acts and events
Edited by Maureen Ehrensberger-Dow, Birgitta Englund Dimitrova, Séverine Hubscher-Davidson and Ulf Norberg
[Benjamins Current Topics 77] 2015
► pp. 21–42

Shared representations and the translation process

A recursive model

ORCID logo
ORCID logo
The purpose of the present chapter is to investigate automated processing during translation. We provide evidence from a translation priming study which suggests that translation involves activation of shared lexico-semantic and syntactical representations, i.e., the activation of features of both source and target language items which share one single cognitive representation. We argue that activation of shared representations facilitates automated processing. The chapter revises the literal translation hypothesis and the monitor model (Ivir 1981; Toury 1995; Tirkkonen-Condit 2005), and re-defines it in terms of findings from translation process research. On the basis of the evidence, we propose a recursive model of translation.
Keywords: literal translation, monitor model, priming
Published online: 1 October 2015
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/bct.77.03sch
References (52)
Basnight-Brown, Dana M., and Jeanette Altarriba. 2007. “Differences in Semantic and Translation Priming across Languages: The Role of Language Direction and Language Dominance.” Memory and Cognition 35: 953–965. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bock, Kathryn. 1986. “Syntactic Persistence in Language Production.” Cognitive Psychology 18: 355–387. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Carl, Michael, and Barbara Dragsted. 2012. “Inside the Monitor Model: Processes of Default and Challenged Translation Production.” Translation: Computation, Corpora, Cognition 2: 127–145. [URL].Google Scholar
Catford, John C. 1965. A Linguistic Theory of Translation: An Essay in Applied Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Christoffels, Ingrid K., and Annette M.B. De Groot. 2005. “Simultaneous Interpreting: A Cognitive Perspective.” In Handbook of Bilingualism Psycholinguistic Approaches, ed. by Judith F. Kroll, and Annette M.B. De Groot, 454–479. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
De Groot, Annette M.B. 2011. Language and Cognition in Bilinguals and Multilinguals: An Introduction. New York, NY: Psychology Press.Google Scholar
. 1997. “The Cognitive Study of Translation and Interpretation: Three Approaches.” In Cognitive Processes in Translation and Interpreting, ed. by Joseph H. Danks, Gregory M. Shreve, Stephen B. Fountain, and Michael McBeath, 25–56. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.Google Scholar
Desmet, Timothy, and Mieke Declercq. 2006. “Cross-linguistic Priming of Syntactic Hierarchical Configuration Information.” Journal of Memory and Language 54: 610–632. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Diamond, Bruce J., and Gregory M. Shreve. 2010. “Neural and Physiological Correlates: Recent Perspectives.” In Translation and Cognition, ed. by Gregory M. Shreve, and Erik Angelone, 289–323. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dimitropoulou, Maria, Jon A. Duñabeitia, and Manuel Carreiras. 2011. “Masked Translation Priming Effects with Low Proficient Bilinguals.” Memory and Cognition 39: 260–275. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dragsted, Barbara. 2010. “Coordination of Reading and Writing Processes in Translation: An Eye on Unchartered Territory.” In Translation and Cognition, ed. by Gregory M. Shreve, and Erik Angelone, 41–62. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Duñabeitia, Jon A., Manuel Perea, and Manuel Carreiras. 2010. “Masked Translation Priming Effects with Highly Proficient Simultaneous Bilinguals.” Experimental Psychology 57: 98–107. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Duyck, Wouter, and Nele Warlop. 2009. “Translation Priming between the Native Language and a Second Language: New Evidence from Dutch-French Bilinguals.” Experimental Psychology 56: 173–179. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Englund Dimitrova, Birgitta. 2005. Expertise and Explicitation in the Translation Process. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Eskola, Sari. 2004. “Untypical frequencies in Translated Language: A Corpus-based Study on a Literary Corpus of Translated and Non-translated Finnish.” In Translation Universals: Do They Exist? ed. by Anna Mauranen, and Pekka Kujamäki, 83–99. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gellerstam, Martin. 1996. “Translation as a Source for Cross-linguistic Studies.” In Languages in Contrast, ed. by Karin Aijmer, Bengt Altenberg, and Mats Johansson, 53–62. Lund: Lund University Press.Google Scholar
Gollan, Tamar H., Kenneth I. Forster, and Ram Frost. 1997. “Translation Priming with Different Scripts: Masked Priming with Cognates and Noncognates in Hebrew-English Bilinguals.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory and Cognition 23: 1122–1139. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Grosjean, François. 1997. “The Bilingual Individual.” Interpreting 2: 163–187. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hartsuiker, Robert J., Martin J. Pickering, and Eline Veltkamp. 2004. “Is Syntax Separate or Shared between Languages? Cross-linguistic Syntactic Priming in Spanish-English Bilinguals.” Psychological Science 15: 409–414. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hemingway, Ernest. 1975. The Old Man and the Sea. London: Jonathan Cape.Google Scholar
Heydel, Maren, and Wayne S. Murray. 2000. “Conceptual Effects in Sentence Priming: A Cross-linguistic Perspective.” In Cross-linguistic Perspectives on Language Processing, ed. by Marica De Vincenzi, and Vincenzo Lombardo, 227–254. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Isham, William P. 1994. “Memory for Sentence Form after Simultaneous Interpretation: Evidence both for and against Deverbalization.” In Bridging the Gap. Empirical Research in Simultaneous Interpretation, ed. by Sylvie Lambert, and Barbara Moser-Mercer, 191–211. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ivir, Vladimir. 1981. “Formal Correspondence vs. Translation Equivalence Revisited.” Poetics Today 2: 51–59. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jarvella, Robert J. 1971. “Syntactic Processing of Connected Speech.” Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 10: 409–416. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jiang, Nan. 1999. “Testing Processing Explanations for the Asymmetry in Masked Cross-language Priming.” Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 2: 59–75. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jiang, Nan, and Kenneth I. Forster. 2001. “Cross-Language Priming Asymmetries in Lexical Decision and Episodic Recognition.” Journal of Memory and Language 44: 32–51. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kantola, Leila, and Roger P.G. van Gompel. 2011. “Between- and Within-Language Priming is the Same: Evidence for Shared Bilingual Syntactic Representations.” Memory and Cognition 39: 276–290. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Keatley, Catharine W., John A. Spinks, and Beatrice De Gelder. 1994. “Asymmetrical Cross-language Priming Effects.” Memory and Cognition 22: 70–84. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Klein, Dan, and Slav Petrov. 2007. “Improved Inference for Unlexicalized Parsing.” In Proceedings of Human Language Technology Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association of Computational Linguistics (HLT-NAACL), Rochester, New York, 22–27 April 2007, ed. by Candace L. Sidner, Tanja Schultz, Matthew Stone, and Cheng Xiang Zhai. Rochester, NY: The Association of Computational Linguistics.Google Scholar
Krings, Hans P., 1986. Was in den Köpfen von Übersetzern vorgeht:eine empirische Untersuchung zur Struktur des Übersetzungsprozesses an fortgeschrittenen Französischlernern [What Happens in the Heads of Translators: An Empirical Investigation of the Structure of the Translation Process in Advanced Students of French]. Tübingen: Gunter Narr.Google Scholar
Loebell, Helga, and Kathryn Bock. 2003. “Structural Priming across Languages.” Linguistics 41: 791–824. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lombardi, Linda, and Mary C. Potter. 1992. “The Regeneration of Syntax in Short Term Memory.” Journal of Memory and Language 6: 713–733. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lörscher, Wolfgang. 1991. Translation Performance, Translation Process and Translation Strategies. A Psycholinguistic Investigation. Tübingen: Gunter Narr.Google Scholar
Macizo, Pedro, and Maria T. Bajo. 2006. “Reading for Repetition and Reading for Translation: Do They Involve the Same Processes?” Cognition 99: 1–34. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Malmkjær, Kirsten. 2005. “Norms and Nature in Translation Studies.” Synaps 16: 13–19.Google Scholar
Meijer, Paul J.A., and Jean E. Fox Tree. 2003. “Building Syntactic Structures in Speaking: A Bilingual Exploration.” Experimental Psychology 50: 184–195. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Paradis, Michel. 2004. A Neurolinguistic Theory of Bilingualism. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 1994. “Toward a Neurolinguistic Theory of Simultaneous Translation: The Framework.” International Journal of Psycholinguistics, 10 (3): 319–335.Google Scholar
Pickering, Martin J., and Holly P. Branigan. 1998. “The Representation of Verbs: Evidence from Syntactic Priming in Language Production.” Journal of Memory and Language 39: 633–651. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pickering, Martin J., and Victor S. Ferreira. 2008. “Structural Priming: a Critical Review.” Psychological Bulletin 134: 427–459. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Potter, Mary C., and Linda Lombardi. 1990. “Regeneration in the Short-Term Recall of Sentences.” Journal of Memory and Language 29: 633–654. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 1998. “Syntactic Priming in Immediate Recall of Sentences.” Journal of Memory and Language 38: 265–282. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Reichle, Erik D., Tessa Warren, and Kerry McConnell. 2009. “Using E-Z Reader to Model the Effects of Higher Level Language Processing on Eye Movements during Reading.” Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 16: 1–21. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ruiz, Carmen, Natalia Paredes, Pedro Macizo, and Maria T. Bajo. 2008. “Activation of Lexical and Syntactic Target Language Properties in Translation.” Acta Psychologica 128: 490–500. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Salamoura, Angeliki, and John N. Williams. 2007. “Processing Verb Argument Structure across Languages: Evidence for Shared Representations in the Bilingual Lexicon.” Applied Psycholinguistics 28: 627–660. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schoonbaert, Sofie, Robert J. Hartsuiker, and Martin J. Pickering. 2007. “The Representation of Lexical and Syntactic Information in Bilinguals: Evidence from Syntactic Priming.” Journal of Memory and Language 56: 153–171. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schoonbaert, Sofie, Phillip J. Holcomb, Jonathan Grainger, and Robert J. Hartsuiker. 2011. “Testing Asymmetries in Noncognate Translation Priming: Evidence from RTs and ERPs.” Psychophysiology 48: 74–81. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tirkkonen-Condit, Sonja, Jukka Mäkisalo, and Sini Immonen. 2008. “The Translation Process — Interplay between Literal Rendering and a Search for Sense.” Across Languages and Cultures 9: 1–15. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tirkkonen-Condit, Sonja. 2005. “The Monitor Model Revisited: Evidence from Process Research.” Meta 50: 405–414. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Toury, Gideon. 1995. Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Vandepitte, Sonia, and Robert J. Hartsuiker. 2011. “Metonymic Language Use as a Student Translation Problem: Towards a Controlled Psycholinguistic Investigation.” In Methods and Strategies of Process Research: Integrative Approaches in Translation Studies, ed. by Cecilia Alvstad, Adelina Hild, and Elisabet Tiselius, 67–92. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by (5)

Cited by five other publications

Carl, Michael
2023. Empirical translation process research. Translation, Cognition & Behavior 6:2 ► pp. 252 ff. DOI logo
Carl, Michael
2023. Chapter 12. The Monitor Model and its misconceptions. In Translation in Transition [American Translators Association Scholarly Monograph Series, XX], ► pp. 257 ff. DOI logo
Lacruz, Isabel
2023. Chapter 1. Translation in transition. In Translation in Transition [American Translators Association Scholarly Monograph Series, XX], ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Alves, Fabio & Arnt Lykke Jakobsen
2022. The Translation Process. In The Cambridge Handbook of Translation, ► pp. 34 ff. DOI logo
Jakobsen, Arnt Lykke
2017. Translation Process Research. In The Handbook of Translation and Cognition, ► pp. 19 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 3 december 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.